I lasted three minutes at Amazon
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This is a Kafka level story, having long dealings with an obviously incompetent and labyrinthine organization, only to be immediately penalized for the slightest miss on his own part. Especially the "if you're not at your workstation in one minute you'll be penalized / where is my workstation / I dont know" bit is straight out of The Castle or something.
Anyway, I agree with his overall feeling on the state of labor now.
It must be an accident that the process is so catastrophically bad that it leaves new hires drained and crying. But you'd almost start to wonder how much worse you could really make it, if you were optimizing for "plausibly deniable torment”. I don't have it in me to imagine how.
Part of it's to make people feel powerful, like the person who gloried in busting people taking time off. Part of it's clearly conformance to plan, where people are rewarded for marking items in a list done, whether or not they were effective. And I'm sure there are executive metrics that hit targets, no matter how many unmeasured things get worse.
What else to people see?
Dysfunctional organizations are something horrible we should punish as a society. They are an enormous waste of resources. I am surprised this Amazon department so dysfunctional, since the company as a whole is doing quite well.
The state of Amazon's blue collar working conditions are widely considered to be crap of course, and there are a lot of complaints about labor laws, unions, outsourcing and immigration, etc. I didn't quite see how he connected the issues in the post though. I mean beyond state of labor = not good (and maybe that's all you were saying too).
What's interesting though is I don't hear a lot of people on HN complaining about CI/CD, which IMO is part of an overall approach that treats devs like cogs in an automated process.
In some ways, I think we even celebrate it because, as devs, we are the automators. But increasingly, we're becoming more beholden to the processes we've automated.
The entire concept of how people do code-reviews with PRs is completely broken and everyone's experienced it: when someone leaves a review, asking you to change a variable name, what is even the process? Can I just say "no"? Why didn't they with full access to the branch, just submit the commit? Or open a PR against the branch (did you know you can do that?)? Why aren't code reviews just cherry-pickable commits against branches by default? Why doesn't the PR process let me do a partial rebase as acceptance? Why does everyone do code reviews looking at diffs, when they can't possibly have enough context? (its because the tools are junk and make it difficult to do - I had an idea of doing some line number magic to do full-code commenting in gitlab review mode, but never got round to it).
Like...the situation is about as bad, we're all just salaried.
>Why didn't they with full access to the branch, just submit the commit? Or open a PR against the branch (did you know you can do that?)?
As for some of these why questions, I think the answer is that they want to enforce that you follow the process. I've seen people get cartoonishly bent out of shape over exactly this kind of stuff, "you're supposed to do x!". It's part of how devs are "automated".
The problem is that there's an expectation that this increase team velocity more than it increases quality of living.
15 years ago in IT if you could automate things, you just ended up with less active work to do. Now that automation is the norm instead of a bonus cool thing, it has become formalized and measured, and you may not have the saved time as free time, you have to now double down on doing the hard parts of the job.
This doesn't actually work in reality for most people as we can't actually think hard for more than a few hours out of the work day (10x'rs exempt, of course.)
True. OTOH, I feel like some version of this is always sold as the worker-facing rationale for automation and increased productivity. For some jobs, it's "hey, we're going to automate your job away so you can go do something meaningful with your life". For devs, it's "we're going to automate this for you so you can focus on meaningful work here".
>The problem is that there's an expectation that this increase team velocity more than it increases quality of living.
That's it in a nutshell. The "gains" don't accrue to devs, but to the never-ending hunt for still more productivity.
And, I think that's a feature; not a bug. That is, from an organizational perspective, agile and all that it's ushered in (including devops and CI/CD) were never intended to improve dev quality of life. Instead, they're all about the highest LOC in the minimum time, a.k.a "productivity".
I dont disagree with your observations, just saying "productivity" gain is pretty far down the list of benefits to me personally
>"productivity" gain is pretty far down the list of benefits to me personally
Yeah, in reply to the other comment, I was saying that automation from an organizational perspective is not so much about improving the quality of life for devs, as it is about increasing their productivity.
Given enough time, and a smooth process, eventually this should not be so painful; but when it is painful, it is supposed to be the job of a human (especially once in HR) to act as a bridge between process and person, so as to keep morale at a good level and to provide a channel for feedback from employees up to the teams responsible for process automation. It doesn't sound like this is in place here, at all; instead we have people who are displaying all the signs of not caring about the human anymore because they have become so subservient to the machine that they cannot afford to.
What's really grating is that these people and "low skill" jobs that form the backbone of our functional society have been abandoned by the political movement they bled to create (which is obviously now hijacked and totally perverted by the ruling class).
It makes me cringe every time I hear a "left" wing voter or politician boast about how much the uneducateds dislike them, and gloat about how worthless those people must be to be concerned about immigration policies affecting their jobs. It's no surprise their lot is not improving. I only hope they can band together and affect real change again before the ruling class is able to irrevocably divide people against one another. Maybe it's already too late :(
The stories can be fun but under no circumstances should anyone take what is written at face value.
> I wake up with the worst existential dread I’ve ever experienced. I cried for an hour straight. Not because amazon specifically, but for the broader state of labor in general.
All you need to do is look at the subs the same mods mod...
r/Anarchism r/Anarchy101 r/IWW r/LateStageCapitalism r/lostgeneration r/Socialism_101 r/mutualism r/radicalmentalhealth
Employee: I can't come in today for a very good reason.
Boss (rudely): You have to come in or you're fired.
Employee: I quit.
+1000 karma
There are billions of workers around the world, tens of millions using reddit.
The 1000+ upvote ones are long, overly personal explanations of why they can’t come in that make the boss look extra evil, but also sound fake as hell.
If someone just quits good on them, but that text exchange is not going to draw enough eyeballs.
I mean, the OP post already alludes to the issue with american labor where you're pressured to do something like fake a death in the family to justify taking a day off of what should be a totally replaceable hourly shift. Hourly wage labour jobs are pressured to give those overly personal explanations to get managers to respect any request for time off and it's just seen as the norm.
But to be serious, I don't personally believe the stories, because I just can't know. Sometimes entirely plausible stories get debunked as fake, other times wild ones turn out to be true. I'm not committed to call them all fake, but we really just can't know.
Retail is hell. It's the worst on-call you've ever experienced times a thousand.
If you haven't worked retail in the last few years, I'd actually suggest doing the following: Go on the dating app of your choice and put out that you're legit looking for coffee with folks who work hourly retail jobs. You're vaguely tech adjacent, you can automate those swipes. Literally just ask people who match with you to tell their worst experience in retail.
Ask those retail folks: Are you trained enough? Are you understaffed? Does your manager give a shit? Do you actually get the tips you're supposed to get? If you could walk away right now, would you?
Invite 'em to have a coffee/tea, etc in some public place. Talk about what's going on. Genuinely give a shit. What you'll learn is that most hourly retail folks are living hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck. A friend of mine in college was making $7.70 an hour as a shift manager at a Taco Bell. The straw that broke the camel's back was when his manager suggested he take a *decrease in pay* and an *increase in hours* in exchange for "maybe getting salaried". He left and now is paid $35/hr to sell marijuana.
As someone who works a salaried job at a MANGA/FAANG Forbes Top 100, I feel that some of us lose sight of what our retail-facing hourly folk are actually doing. Retail folks get the most abuse from both sides that I've seen.
Last week, in the grocery near me, I looked at a dude who was mad about a few labels being misaligned, screaming until he was red in the face at an employee about how he was being ripped off, about how this was terrible. It wasn't until I walked over and (legitimately wanting the thing he was mad over) asked him to politely shut up and get over himself for not reading that he stopped, stomping out of the store. This store, like many others, basically demand that these people be happy in the face of abject abuse. The security at the door? That's only for shoplifting. Being a complete jerk to the floor workers? Not that poor fuck's job, and they can be reprimanded for stopping a fight from happening.
In the face of [Nine dollar paychecks for 70 hours of work](https://www.today.com/food/working-mom-received-9-paycheck-7...), a [rising wage theft issue that accounts for billions in unpaid wages](https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...), it's no wonder that [suicide rates of retail workers is going up](https://archive.md/VrvBu).
Thank God I don't work retail.
but the whole problem is that these people are powerless. they are not the majority[0] and of course they are the wrong minority (not the rich one, duh).
[0] which - compared to agrarian times - is great, [yaay progress!] but at the same time it's completely fucked up because the "median voter" [still] doesn't really care. (due to a myriad of reasons from the evo-psycho Dunbar's numbers reasons to the "Marx: capitalism is alienating the worker from its self", or in a bit more modern phrasing "neoliberalism atomized society [1] (by focus on individualism and individual rights)" - , plus things are changing too fast[2] and the vastly different responses by different ideological groups are leading to extreme political polarization, and so on).
r/Anarchism r/Anarchy101 r/IWW r/LateStageCapitalism r/lostgeneration r/Socialism_101 r/mutualism r/radicalmentalhealth
It's part of an anarcho-socialist grouping of Reddit subs that push a specific agenda.
You cannot take anything there seriously.
> In the Earnings Call in July of this year, they said they now employe 950,000 warehouse workers. They're probably over the 1 MM mark right now due to the holidays. Yes, there are plenty of people working there that are overqualified, but that is the beauty of what Amazon is doing. Their onboarding and recruiting for this is incredibly smooth, fast, and will give virtually everyone a chance.
I guess if you hire 500,000 people per year and 99% of people have an excellent onboarding process there will be 5,000 bad stories?
Also, fun math question: if they have 1MM workers, and hire 500k every year, what is their turnover rate?
I'm not arguing these are good or bad (H1Bs especially are abused) but they definitely happened and have a massive groundswell of support from one party.
You think they’re going to try to lobby to get blue collar people in? “Effectively open borders”, my ass.
That said, if the general case folk get their way, I assume that your special case will be included.
I do note that folks who want lots of low-skilled immigrants (the "who's going to pick grapes" folks) might not care that much about every instance of high-skilled immigrants.
What if there are more than "5,000 stories" - There could be 50,000 of these.
All the while, the salaried, fully insured and vastly more expensive ‘real’ employees all show up late to meetings, randomly work from home because their ISP is upgrading their equipment and occasionally drag a lunch to two hours or more.
What a nightmare.
The rest was a like landing in an island all by yourself. Nothing works, no one can help you, and you are on your own. Sometimes, he would just sit in the truck for a moment, holding his head together not knowing what to do. That was until the cameras were installed in the truck for them slackers.
The only way he managed to survive there was out the generosity of random old time drivers that he met on the street. They gave him the ropes, shared private WhatsApp group where they coordinate and help each other with tips and tricks.
This stuff isn't new.
Regulations don’t stand a chance of moving quickly enough to keep up with Amazon’s innovation budget. The only way to counter that is worker unions, which can make specific and timely demands that Amazon treat workers more humanely.
If workers unionize, Amazon has to stop externalizing the cost of labor.
The ones that stay long term are those people willing to overlook a shit job, aggressive output measuring, and draconian management. Those folks generally aren’t beating the union drum within the org as loud as the transient 30 day folks. Unions have trouble finding purchase because organizers are fighting that turnover and the folks motivated to unionize don’t have the patience to get there.
It's a warehouse job; I struggle to see why you even need any humans in the loop above the workers at all. Clock in, move the boxes, mark tasks completed on your handheld, clock out. Frankly I have no idea why the people org as described by OP exists the way it does for a company known for its cloud services. None of these morons OP dealt with needed to be employed.
The only time I worked at a job that required drug tests, was at a transportation company where federal law required it.
Only place where my manager expected me to work multiple nights per week. This was as a software engineer!
At this point drug tests are just a filter. Let's me know the company culture will suck.
It's pretty silly but it seems to be a common thread.
There are drug testing requirements for specific jobs/industries that are safety and security related.
https://www.samhsa.gov/workplace/legal/federal-laws/safety-s...
Not even mentioning the whole bait-and-switch, where I was led to believe that i was interviewing for a position at Twitch, not at at Amazon itself. Turns out, after I got suspicious of it all and asked quite a bunch of very specific questions from my interviewers, it was revealed that it was actually for a role on an AWS team that worked as a partner for Twitch. After me asking the recruiter if I just misunderstood it all from the start, I was just met with “well, it is still working with Twitch, just for AWS”. I was kinda mad after spending those miserable months interviewing, especially since i made it clear to the recruiter from the very start that I am solely interested if it is a job at Twitch and not Amazon. Lesson learned though.
The second time around it was even more polished than the first time, but contained much less useful information and more cheerleading, so I left once I had my axe and saw that it was sharp.
if you used cannabis and got caught, you'll have a police record for up to 5 years
when applying expect it not to be in your favour
Every single job I've had in California for the past 30 years (from academic software engineer to computer scientist to industry software engineer) has clearly stated that they do not drug test before I signed any paper. In fact, my manager at Lawrence Berkeley Lab (RIP) was specifically sent there after he refused to take a drug test at a more serious DOE lab, "so he could fit in with all the other hippies and druggies".
I can't speak to any of the other roles, although in my time in the food service industry there wasn't any testing either.
“ I go home absolutely drained and i didn’t even do anything. I wake up with the worst existential dread I’ve ever experienced. I cried for an hour straight. Not because amazon specifically, but for the broader state of labor in general.
Sometimes id rather die then suffer until I die from an illness inevitably. I power through my break down. Leave for work to drive through a horrible storm. I ended up being a single minute late. I already get one point against me. Then I’m told if I’m not at my station by 7:05 I’ll get another point. I was never told where to report to. So I asked. In the rudest way possible they say they don’t know. I walk a little bit. 7:05 hits. And I just turn around and go home.
I did everything I was supposed to do but got shit on before I even officially hit the floor. From the time I applied to when I walked out. I tried so hard to be optimistic, but that was the worst experience I’ve had getting a new job. I can’t help but feel disappointed with myself. I’m not in a good financial situation, and my girlfriend is not going to be happy. But with it being a shit show the entire time I just don’t see how that was gonna work, especially at a company like amazon. “
>I cried for an hour straight. Not because amazon specifically, but for the broader state of labor in general.
I mean... I can't imagine an emotionally balanced person writing that. I don't want to make this into a personal attack, so maybe it just needs to be recognized that a lot of jobs -- most jobs -- deal with numerous stresses, and some people are not fit for those jobs. It's sad, because it's a very important life skill.
You are looking at algorithmic feeds which propagate only information which has the majority vote. Not only that, but a majority vote of a community which becomes more radical as any opposition or moderates are pushed out.
Point a microphone at a speaker and crank the gain. That awful feedback noise is Reddit.
It’s not a hiring process. There is no interview. They aren’t interested in working with you to figure out if you’re a good fit for each other.
They’re trawling the ocean and filtering the catch through drug and background tests. They process countless people every day, constantly replacing others who have broken down or reached EOL. Nobody here is meant to be anything but a cheap robot with decent sensor-end effector coordination. In fact, their humanity is a liability that Amazon begrudgingly tolerates, largely because it has to.
We need robots in the worst possible way to replace any and every job that people would never choose to do as a hobby.
That said, it's not THAT hard to get through process, and something of the steps are just filter. We don't know the posters work history / capacity / etc. We do know amazon probably cares very little that this person made it only 3 minutes?
I did hear that for older workers they have a work hardening process during peak to try to harden up workers a bit more gradually to be able to handle full shifts.
you are just as replaceable and the interview process is only there to filter out the bad candidates
it's only more intense because the cost/risk ratio is magnitudes higher
Which is a pretty strong argument for a tech workers union (as well as a warehouse workers union), if not now, a few more years down the line when salaries go down as a result of saturation.
I mean this exists in factories and I ve seen it... but in the floor manager, not the dudes mindlessly putting small boxes into big boxes. I d love to put them in front of a computer and let them try but they dont seem to want to, or have the discipline to spend years learning english in the first place :s
And whatever the original reason, it's probably fair to say it's parental supervision, societal discrimination or whatever, but saying it's just experience is wrong imo. To even want to acquire this experience, is something I cant even explain, I just always wanted to and shaped my life around computers, and believe maybe naively that even with a difficult starting condition, I d have ended up coding eventually all things equal.
And it's okay to suspect capital owners will try to comoditize it but it's going to transform them into people able to talk to machines or transform us into capital owners - I dont think you can design algorithms to do what you want without willing to dig into them and for that you may always need special people ? We never comoditized electricians, and this is not a trade you can simply replace anyone with anyone, so...
Yeah, let's do it when we get there
It’s still possible for it to go the way you say, but so far there’s no evidence of that.
yet, have you seen how many bootcamps and hype there is about tech industry?
anyone wants to be in, anyone wants the perks
the companies will do anything to trivialise our job and race wages to the bottom, so they could justify spending less money on "human resources"
"Rightsizing" those is great for the bonus.
Wrong approach.
Push for real engineering certifications instead. Keeps the free market (no promotions based on seniority) but weeds out the "6 month bootcamp fullstack engineer" disaster from your codebase.
Sure, maybe you open-source the initial development, but you can't open-source the politics because nobody can have a sensible conversation with a million people working at at least partial cross purposes, and so when you're doing the politics you make a lot of compromises that nobody gets a say in.
Best case you fail, worst case you succeed and everyone is stuck with the result, which inevitably favors employers because why do they even participate if they don't get something at least a little more like a buyer's market out of it?
So nobody with any experience, maybe even nobody with any common sense, participates in whatever process you have from the design side, because all that does is waste time lending legitimacy to something that's guaranteed to be a bad deal for labor. You haven't even sold me on it!
Of course, if you have buy-in and trust from a sizable and valuable labor base first, all this changes. But that means a tangible history of success as part of the leadership of a union, and you've already ruled that out. What you're proposing would be more like a guild, which is actually a model that can work when the people who run it also monopolize the local industry and can exclude anyone who doesn't meet their standards - including preventing other business owners from defecting and hiring skilled upstarts who the guild won't accept for inevitable and again political reasons. Management in this industry isn't that coordinated either, and can't be without being a lot more oligopolistic than it already is.
Maybe in a few decades. Right now I don't see it.
Yeah, let's cartelize a real free market.
That's one way of running a tech company but what you'll end up with is going to look more like one of those comically bad bodyshops that's used for outsourcing. These have a turnover so high it's almost impossible to find someone with more than two years of experience. And, well, the results speak for themselves.
Truth is there are people out there that are trying really hard to commoditize software engineering, with bootcamps and whatnot. And honestly, I'm not impressed one bit. Best way to build the best software (it's a winner take all market remember?) is simply to bite the bullet and go get the best talent out there. The 10x rule is well and alive.
at least as far as TFA is concerned, it's not really about "a tech company", but a shipping/receiving/warehouse facility.
i think we should stop competing and just self-employ ourselves
Reductionism used to throw rocks at a labor intensive enterprise that Amazon is preposterous and distracting from real issues.
A really bad pianist will maybe hit some if the notes correctly sometimes. Like a really bad software developer through sheer luck might hit copy and paste shortcuts on the right stackoverflow post from time to time. But you will fire both very fast.
A good enough pianist will proba ly hit all the right notes most of the time. Like a good enough software developer who will write software that works most of the time because he hit the right keys most of time. Probably a combination of being reasonably good at finding the right stackoverflow posts most of the time and some general knowledge of ifs and for loops.
Then there's the pianist that that actually feels the music on the sheet. That doesn't just read the sterile notes on the sheet. Or a software developer that writes readable, maintainable code in 'no time'.
Theres a nice TED talk on this topic. I think he compares pianists of various ages to show this. Benjamin Zander, a famous conductor. Worth the watch even if you don't like classical music if you ask me.
Here's a couple jobs that are in short supply: Home inspectors and appraisers. After the 2009 crash, they changed the licensing rules and it's led to a serious shortage of appraisers in particular. Both of these are gigs where you get to set your own schedule and can make some reasonable money while not needing to be a rocket surgeon. Yet, we can't find enough people willing to do it.
We have had really great experiences with tradespeople in one way and also incredibly bad with others.
A lot electrical work is required to be done by an electrician here. But what do you do when you have the electrician come out for a quote, you have the manufacturers manual opened to the page with the specs and the electrician can't make sense of it?
The specs clearly stated that the appliance needed multiple separate lines, including min wire gauge and the double pole breaker amperage. I knew I didn't have enough space in the panel for the required double poles. That's part of the reason I called the guy in the first place. And then he tells me it's no problem, the existing wire is sufficient and I can just order the appliance and he's gonna 'hook it up'. Unbelievable!
It took me quite some time of repeating (in different ways) all the info presented in the manual to get him to call his boss, read out the manual multiple times, telling me various half truths, being made to call his boss again and relay the parts of the specs he left out to arrive at the final answer.
The only thing that guy would've been good for is changing alight fixture, which is something you are required to hire an electrician for here. Where I grew up that is something an electrician will not even consider giving you a call back about if you were to try and hire him.
-154 hours of classes ($1000+)
-get initial license ($160)
-1,000 hours logged as a trainee of an appraiser (so anyone teaching loses money to pay a trainee or you work for free)
-apply ($35) to take and pass a state exam ($126)
- get full license ($175)
So it takes at least $1,500 and at least 6 months to even start making money. Then many appraisals require actually entering the home and taking pictures or a drive by, so there is massive amounts of travel on top of the paperwork. It's way more detailed than just picking a number for price based on X reasons, and anything that is inaccurate is on you to fix as part of the original fee.
However after getting several houses inspected, making good money doing that, I can believe.
UBI and whatnot is inevitable.
Then you check the monitor to figure out what job you will be doing (ie, pack or rebin)
If your station is taken for some reason, you should be able to just move to another station and log in there - you don't have to use station assigned.
You will also have a monitor which shoes your rate.
Managers probably won't even know your name, and if you are day one employee showing up late, will have no clue who you are.
Some of the safety rules (because amazon get's hammered on this) - SUPER annoying - no listening to music - are you kidding? The most boring job possible, and to keep folks safe no music, not even one earbud in.
It's really a swamp down there. Glad I made it out.
Of course there is the "quest for sense" trend. But there is also a trend for selecting the most resilient to frustration and the most obedient. I interpret this as an influence low cost countries have on high-cost countries workforce.
Forget about creativity, efficiency, technical excellence. These are not the values cherished by many companies these days.
maybe just hosts file..
Maybe at Amazon it is representative? But it's often not.
But can we just talk about how every one of these people will have some bit somewhere down where “and my anxiety is getting worse” or “my ADHD is acting up” or something like that.
It’s like this universal phenomenon. Like, I fully expect to see it when I start something like this. Personally I had my money on “And she didn’t understand that I was having a panic attack”. But ultimately it delivered in a different way.
https://hiring.amazon.com/hiring-process#/ https://hiring.amazon.com/hiring-process/application-guide#/
This guy did an insanely detailed step by step of the process.
https://youtu.be/mfKctyhTi_Y?t=60
Playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8Ja-dm83mgqj8B_cP4Gt...
He has videos about picking jobs, application, first day etc.
Note that from what I've heard Amazon really leans on the tech (ie, Amazon A to Z). You can resign / quit etc even from the phone app you download.
Probably for the best for this person they didn't make it more than 3 minutes at the job - its not that easy in the end from what I've heard - much easier WFH type jobs these days if you can get them.